in we trust 99many, many more resorted to highly anthropomorphic images of religion, as
the God of what were apparently six Christians and one Jew served as the
ultimate Protector. Others linked the tragedy directly to the American political
identity.
These images contrasted sharply with the very technical reports emanating
from NASA. The strategies available to NASA officials as they struggled to
regain trust in their authority were limited: they could not build explicit alli-
ances with state or with religion to share the blame. But NASA officials were
aided nonetheless by a political and cultural climate in which God and govern-
ment were closely allied with the space shuttle mission. Yes, science stumbled,
but the very important scientific, economic, and moral questions that concern
manned space research never found their way onto the editorial pages because
of the distributed political and cultural effort to ensure that the broader au-
thoritative network, this overarching alliance of religion, science, and state, was
maintained.
There are certain philosophical meta-arguments common to science and
religion in producing what appears to be convincingly legitimate authority. I’d
like to mention one: objectivity, a claim to authoritative certainty on a reality
separate from those claims, a moon far removed from the finger. Science is
famous for this, but objectivity is not an inevitable feature of scientific insti-
tutions. Philosopher and historian Stephen Toulmin has argued that European
modernity involved not one but two traditions: an earlier tradition of Renais-
sance humanism grounded in a tolerant blend of religion, science, and the
arts, exemplified in the work of Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare; and
what he calls the seventeenth-century Counter-Renaissance, when economic
crisis and religious struggle resulted in an emphasis on the rational pursuit of
abstract objectivity by key figures such as Descartes and Newton.^26 Scientific
objectivity can, in Toulmin’s view, be traced directly back to this seventeenth-
century “struggle for certainty”; it is now, as it was then, epistemologically
unnecessary to science, but politically advantageous in grounding claims of
authority in uncertain times.
There are perhaps deeper reasons, and contradictions, underlying the
premise of objectivity as well. Science studies scholar Evelyn Fox Keller invokes
feminist and psychoanalytical theory in her attempt to fathom objectivity:
The objectivist illusion reflects back a self as autonomous and objec-
tified: an image of individuals unto themselves, severed from the
outside world of other objects (animate as well as inanimate) and si-
multaneously from their own subjectivity.^27Objectivity is as much a feature of the transcendent God of certain West-
ern religious traditions as the transcendent reality of Descartes. Yet religion,
in claiming authority not just on matters about God but also on matters of
the subject, the religious believer, necessarily adopts a divided stance on ob-